Legacies of the Great War

It is another Armistice Day, Veterans Day in the USA, and as a World War I historian I always think about the many veterans I interviewed from the Great War as a student at the University of Utah. The topics included aviation, the Spanish Flu epidemic and the routine duty of life as a soldier. My area of specialty was interned civilians and I spoke to many who knew of their suffering. The Great War was later overshadowed by the larger effort in World War II and was largely forgotten. So many of the conflicts we see today arose during World War I. Consider the formation of Iraq, created in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The lessons of the first war are also forgotten but the legacies of that war were carried on over 70 years later. When Yugoslavia was in turmoil and Croatia and Serbia were fighting I was in Zagreb and examined some of the hardware being used by the Croatian army. Arms and uniforms from Hungary and Austria were present. Serbia was being backed by Russia, their traditional protector. The alliances of World War I reappeared in the Balkans, or they never really disappeared. Germany recognized Croatia as an independent state very early triggering a number of unintended events. The parallels were eerily similar to those in 1914. Where were the lessons learned? I would like that question answered by someone. I think the residents of Srebrenica in July 1995 are crying out for those questions to be answered.

The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were granted independence after World War I. They were absorbed into the USSR in 1940 but in 1990 Lithuania stood alone against Soviet tanks. As I climbed around the blocks put in front of the Seimas in Vilnius to defend against the tanks I was amazed that this state was standing so bravely in the cause of liberty. It was an inspiring sight. One needed only go to the television tower to be reminded that the price of liberty was not cheap.

My wife and I were in Austria and when we came upon the casket of Zita, the last hereditary heir to the Hapsburg throne, and wondered why the flowers and adulation. The resurgence of the possibility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, even in a trade zone, lingered. I saw the same reverence toward the Czar Nicholas II while in Moscow in 1990. I would have thought the war was over but the death of the empires was still mourned by generations who knew nothing of Good Soldier Svejk or the carnage of the eastern front.

A small delegation to the peace talks in France in 1919 requested independence for French Indo-China. Unfortunately that was denied and the end result was over 50,000 American dead in Vietnam. My father fought in that war, a war that could have been avoided as part of the peace process ending that war.

I visited a small town in Nebraska that was settled by Germans in the early 1900s. It was a prosperous town and on the old buildings you could see evidence of the prosperity from years ago. This town was also the scene of some cultural cleansing - prohibiting the German language from being used in the churches and schools. German books were burned in the square by some nearby "patriots." So many of these incidents were fogotten over time. Pride in being German was wiped clean in the spring of 1918. Many ethnic groups preserved some part of their heritage but Germans erased their links to the old country in a very short burst of nativist sentiment in 1918.

Do we really know about the legacies of the Great War?

The Ghosts of 1968

For the past forty years I have felt that our country went in a direction quite different than where I believed our nation should be headed. To those of us who remember 1968 all seem to view that time in different ways. I was fifteen years old living in Vancouver Washington in a military family. By the end of the year I would be living in West Germany. We traveled across the country and saw cities and towns and a nation in turmoil. From that year on our nation lost an element of optimism and belief in our government. Presidents Carter Reagan and Clinton never recaptured what we had. I suppose we can even trace it back to November 1963. The night the promise of the nation died was June 5, 1968 with the assassination of Senator Robert Francis Kennedy. I was a news junkie from birth it seems as I recall looking at newspapers before I could read. The evening news was an event that we genuinely looked forward to daily along with the newspapers that would give depth to events. This was history unfolding and I would read whatever I could find to understand the social or political movements surrounding events. I was particularly impressed with Senator Kennedy’s intelligence and positions on the issues. I think what I saw in him was someone who could go to the ghetto and into the areas of our country that the riots of 1967 had laid waste. Racial hatred the year before was shocking to all of America but the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King made us feel that the country was slowly unraveling. Furthering that was the March 1968 speech by President Johnson stating he would not run for another term. The Tet offensive and other events were making the direction of our country uncertain for the first time in a very long time. Event after event made you wonder just what was happening. Senator Kennedy’s death made many believe that political leadership was gone. We all genuinely hurt inside. Through college I hurt and never felt that our leadership was among people I could trust or people up to the task of leading a great nation.

I was at work one day in early 2004 when it was announced that the Democratic party candidates would be holding a radio debate so I decided to tune in. I was familiar with some of the candidates, the usual round-up of legislative heavy hitters. I was unsure who to support but the Republican candidates were certainly not impressive. I heard the introductions and was unfamiliar with Barack Obama except to know somewhat of his legislative career from Chicago. I generally ignored Chicago politics as being in another state from the affairs of Champaign County. When I heard him speak I was transfixed. Who was this guy? He was unlike anything I had ever heard from any politician anywhere I had lived. I recalled that one other person had struck me that way about thirty years before – Congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas. Listening I was hooked. How do I get this man to the senate?

The election road to the senate was easy as Jack Ryan’s campaign self-destructed and Alan Keyes was brought in making a mockery of the Illinois electoral process (as if it wasn’t already a joke). We all knew Senator Obama had a future but events began to overtake that long-term view. The prospect of Hillary Clinton walking into the nomination was repugnant to many of us. Legacy presidencies were a thing of the past and Clinton’s assumption that she would be the candidate was obvious years before the campaign season began in 2007. The field of candidates was not broad enough for many of us and the prospect of Clinton II with the mismanagement and cronies that I had objected to in the 1990s was looming. When I thought of a candidate Senator Obama was the person but how? I then found a "Draft Obama" website and noticed that sentiment did exist within the state and outside Illinois for an Obama candidacy. 

When word came that Senator Obama was considering a run groups within the state sprang up - primarily driven by the young. It took me back to 1968 and how Senator Kennedy, another inexperienced idealist, had stepped forward. 

I did not support Senator Obama out of some sentimental attachment to Senator Kennedy. The attachment is more to responsible government, forward-looking policies, a responsible foreign policy and to stop the waste of an unnecessary war in Iraq. I have now lived long enough to witness that America had forgotten the lessons of Vietnam. We should have been more responsible.

I was walking among the revelers on Michigan Avenue at midnight after Senator Obama was elected and an older man asked me what I thought of all of this. I told him that the ghosts of 1968 from Grant Park and Chicago had been exorcised. Whether we are back on track or taking another side trip we will discover but our society has changed. 

Ray's photos from Grant Park and Michigan Avenue can be seen at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zaruka/sets/72157608720767557/

Why Blog in the first place?

I am feeling old these days and have been particularly lucky to be a witness to history. Since childhood I have been fascinated by human events; ideology, culture, oppression, freedom etc. I have degrees in history and political science from the University of Utah and a master's degree in modern Amercan history. In my academic pursuits I studied the clash of the ideologies as a beginning. 

There have been a variety of turning points in the evolution of my thinking but of those early in my life the ones affecting me the most were those who arrogantly clung to their misinformed beliefs. One junior high teacher comes to mind who was so delusionally anti-communist that I began to question the origins of her beliefs. Had she met these awful people? How were her opinions of communists formed? What had she read that I had not? I had fortunately traveled by the time I was in my early teens and found that life was a bit more complex than represented by ideologs of all persuasions.  

I watched the Twentieth Century unfold and found some irrational need to see for myself. When I look back I saw events and places that today seem distant. In today's world Beijing is a destination at many airports but in 1965 Peking was less familiar than the moon. Today North Korea seems to be the only place with that honor and I see the same knowledge gap there as we had back in the 1960's with the People's Republic of China. 

I will be blogging about things past and present, taking from my diaries and in some cases directly from the location. With the election of Barack Obama we seem to be moving the United States into a new direction. We do not know the exact direction but we know we have turned a corner.